Big choice in race for mayor? Style

Cranley, Qualls both 'very good,' so voters may turn election into a referendum on streetcar, parking deal

Aug. 29, 2013

Written by

Jane Prendergast

Your Enquirer Vote team

Experienced reporters Jane Prendergast, Sharon Coolidge, Cindi Andrews, Jason Williams, James Pilcher and others will do the work so you have what you need to vote in Cincinnati’s city elections this November: • The Basics: All the news the candidates make. • The Background: Candidates’ backgrounds and where they stand on the issues. • The Truth: We will fact-check and truth squad what the candidates say, and do in-depth watchdog reporting and investigations. • The Choice: Attend and watch our candidate forums and debates and use our interactive tools online to help you decide. Always let us know what you need. Contact one of the reporters or political editor Carl Weiser at cweiser@enquirer.com.

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There’s a lot that’s the same about Cincinnati’s two mayoral candidates:

They’re both longtime, successful Democrats. They both earned advanced degrees at Harvard. They both ran unsuccessfully against U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot. They voted the same 98 percent of the time during the 15 months they spent together on City Council. Both have chaired council’s finance committee.

They do disagree on two key issues – the streetcar project and the plan to lease Cincinnati’s parking system. He’s opposed to both; she supports both.

Other than that, there’s one big difference: their styles.

Roxanne Qualls gets the job done mostly quietly, with the power of her Democratic council majority. If she’s frustrated by her colleagues, she rarely shows it much. Maybe just a more tersely worded sentence or two from the dais.

John Cranley’s a little more obviously scrappy. A lawyer, he can argue his point longer than most. And he doesn’t seem to forget the slightest detail.

Cincinnati voters in November will choose a new mayor for the first time since 2005. It’s a choice about leadership style and city direction for potentially the next eight years. Voters go to the polls Sept. 10 to narrow the mayoral field from four to two, almost certainly Qualls and Cranley.

“John is a Kennedy stepchild – more idealistic, charismatic,” said Jim Tarbell, the former vice mayor for whom Qualls took over in 2007 when she returned to council. “She’s more inclined to be dogmatic, more ‘This is the way it needs to be.’ He may be more likely to be out there leading the charge, though he might not be able to articulate it as well as Roxanne does.”

Here’s how the Rev. Peterson Mingo, pastor at Evanston’s Christ Temple Full Gospel Baptist Church and a neighborhood activist for decades, summarizes the style differences: “Cranley has that legal mind. You know, always covering all the angles. Roxanne? She goes more with her passion. She has it with everything that she does.”

Years ago, when Qualls was mayor, he went to her asking for help feeding the fatherless boys in his Rites of Passage program during a weeklong retreat. The city didn’t have the money for it, she told him. So she covered it herself, he said, “a week’s worth of breakfast for 125 people.”

Former Councilman Jeff Berding described Cranley as passionate and “unyielding in his determination” to get things done but said he always found Qualls to be “very reasonable and willing to hear me out.”

Tarbell says he hasn’t made up his mind yet for whom he’ll vote. Berding and Mingo said they like them both and won’t reveal their choices.

HOW THEIR STYLES SHOWED IN OFFICE

Qualls, 60, was first elected to City Council in 1991 after running unsuccessfully twice. She became mayor in 1993, when the mayor’s job was given to council’s top vote-getter, and served to 1999. Cranley, 39, was a council member from 2000, when he was appointed to replace now-Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune, to 2009.

They served together briefly, from September 2007 until January 2009, when Cranley left to work on redeveloping the Incline District in East Price Hill. Since her return six years ago, Qualls has finished first in every council field race.

Their track records:

• During Qualls’ years as mayor, she started Mayor’s Night In, inviting citizens to her office to chat, which other mayors have copied.

In what’s still probably the biggest controversy of her career, Qualls’ personal life became an issue in 1993 when, on WLW-AM with Bill Cunningham two days after she became mayor, callers asked if she was a lesbian. She said her private life wasn’t relevant to her public work. She said the people would speak at the ballot box the next time, judging her by her actions as mayor, not by her private life. She was re-elected. She has since married.

In her current stint on council, a big focus has been “form-based codes,” a zoning alternative that promises to transform neighborhoods into more pedestrian-friendly places. She also started the effort for opt-out electric aggregation, meaning residents and business owners must choose not to be switched to the energy provider with which the city negotiates a proprietary price.

She also led a majority of council members in 2011 to lessen the Cincinnati Retirement System’s liabilities by changing the calculation formulas, raising the retirement age and reducing death benefits. She has shepherded budget negotiations since taking over the finance committee in 2009.

She’s the leader now of a six-member Democratic majority on council, meaning she usually has enough support for anything she wants to do.

• Cranley was briefly public safety committee chairman, an unenviable position in November 2001. That’s when former firebrand attorney Ken Lawson brought to the committee Angela Leisure, the mother of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed man who was shot to death by a police officer.

Angry people essentially took over the meeting, demanding answers police said it was too soon to give. The crowd spilled out of City Hall, and four days of rioting began. Cranley has been criticized for his failure to keep control, but also defended by those who say control of the situation was virtually impossible.

He also led the effort to hire more police officers even when the police chief hadn’t asked for more, which critics say helped cause repeated budget deficits. He wrote the ordinances that created local tax increment financing (TIF) districts, which are helping pay for major redevelopment projects like the Banks.

Qualls also balanced budgets and circumvented as many as 344 layoffs that had been recommended for this year by City Manager Milton Dohoney.

DIFFERENT PATHS CONVERGE IN ELECTION

Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, has remained neutral in the race. He points out the very different paths Cranley and Qualls took to Harvard. Cranley went there straight from a Jesuit high school and Jesuit college, St. Xavier and John Carroll University, to earn his law degree and a master’s in theological studies.

Qualls was first a social worker, house painter, community organizer and mayor before she went to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for a master’s in public administration.

“I think the paths that each of them took has shaped them in different ways,” he said. “John, in some ways, is more outspoken. He has more of the Tom Luken in him. Roxanne has that community organizer-social worker background. In some ways, I think she may have a better connection to many of the community council leaders because of that.”

Burke also points out this key difference: Qualls supports abortion rights and is therefore supported by many women’s groups; Cranley, who grew up Catholic on the West Side, is anti-abortion.

Chris Bortz, a former councilman supporting Cranley, said Cranley is more likely to push back on the administration. He views Cranley as more the pragmatist and Qualls more ideological, citing her push for walkable neighborhoods and on green initiatives.

“John knew that, unless you asked the right question, you weren’t going to have the information you were looking for volunteered,” he said. “John has a serious distrust of government activity, whereas much of what Roxanne is advocating, particularly in planning and transportation, is an expansion of government. Government isn’t a place for creativity, it just isn’t.”

Qualls, he said, “is going to want to do it quietly, without a lot of fanfare, similar to Mark (Mallory). John, on the other hand, loves to air it.”

Berding says little of these differences and nuances might matter on Election Day. He’s convinced many, maybe even most, voters will choose based on two issues: the streetcar and the proposed parking lease.

“For many people, I think that’s the easiest way to decide,” he said. “You have two successful elected officials, two people who have served with distinction. They’re both very good in their own ways.”

Mingo doesn’t look for the campaign to get too nasty: “You’d probably have to go back to kindergarten” to find something bad either candidate had done.

“Maybe John dipped a girl’s pigtail into an ink well. You can’t find a lot of fault in either one of these people.” ⬛